Yes, that’s books, plural. I hooked up with Amazon’s CreateSpace website (next time I will start there, because it’s amazing) and soonishly I should have a print edition of my book available.

I assume it’s a sort of print on demand deal. I have no idea what kind of $$ I will make per sale, but at the moment, I don’t care. I am just thrilled as hell that I will have an actual, physical, pigment on paper book to my name.

Obviously, at some point soon, I will buy one for myself, and display it prominently.

The cover is meh. Don’t get me wrong, I am thrilled that I, you know, have one. Part of my worried of today revolved around how I was going to generate a cover for my eBook, giving my general lack of relevant skills. Skills aside, I had no idea what one actually puts on the cover of a book about death by teleport.

I’m fairly certain there’s nothing in public domain art that would cover that kind of thing.

But it turns out CreateSpace has a cover generation tool, so I picked a minimalist template, filled in my back cover text (going on an ACTUAL back cover!) and will just have to live with it.

I like how it looks, but it lacks pizzazz.

So soon, I should have both an eBook and real book version of my novel available. This thrills me to no end. Plus, I am very happy and proud of myself for completing the process, because I had many moments where I felt overwhelmed with sudden options and
really wanted to just close the tab and go take a nap. But I didn’t close the tab. I just did my other usual stuff and let the emotional reaction subside so I could look at things more reasonably, as they really are, instead of the giant monsters my fears amplify them into.

And so I made it through. I’m happy about that. I really look forward to lying in bed and reading my own book, on paper and everything. I think that will be extremely fulfilling.

Other than that, today has been rather blah. One of my tired days. It happens, I get through it. Spent all morning and the lion’s share of the afternoon in bed, asleep. The fact that I have no caffeine in my bloodstream by now might have something to do with that. Finished my last liter of Diet Coke last night, now I am drinking root beer.

I suppose that, if a day sans caffeination makes you sleep the sleep of the dead, that might just be an indication that you should cut back so you get more normal sleep.

It’s especially bad when I have Diet Coke with my late night snack. I know, let’s drink a liter of caffeinated beverage and then take our sleeping pills and make them fight it out.

When I have my poop in a group, I make sure to get enough pop of both perky and non-perky varieties that I can have my cola with supper and be energetic in the evening, which is usually when I am most active anyhow, and then have something tasty but caffeine free for my midnight snack.

Definitely the smart way to do things. But like I have been saying, the smart, sensible, intelligent option can, despite all logic, sometimes still be wrong for you. There is a vast array of personality factors that must be part of any rational equation that hopes to yield concrete results, and thinking that you are free, or must be free, to take the smart choice every single time is actually a highly irrational belief that smothers your humanity in order to meet some imagined ideal.

You can’t just ignore the damage that trying to be a way that goes against the grain of your nature does to you. Some perfectly reasonable seeming choices may just plain not work out for you. The part of you that you sacrificed in order to make the choice dictated by your rational mind and your overwhelming drive to be smart might just be a part of you that you cannot get back.

It certainly helps explain why we intellectual types tend to be neurotic or even insane. This constant damage to the structure of self leaves a person very vulnerable to collapse of self and the resulting emotional instability.

I have definitely been guilty of this. I have talked before about how I seek the truth no matter what. Well part of that “what” is the damage I take to the structure of my self when going straight for the truth regardless of personal considerations.

And I doubt that is the sort of thing that one can change, wholesale, about oneself. This might be middle age talking, but I am fairly certain it is too late for any large changes in my basic nature. I will always be a lively intellectual who goes straight for the heart of things by instinct. I want to truly understand what is going on, and that’s not about to change.

But perhaps I can be more forgiving towards myself. Perhaps I can give myself more permission to be irrational. To do silly things that are clearly not the smart thing to do from the point of view of a narrow kind of rationalism, but which are, in fact, entirely worth doing because they make me happy and don’t really cost me very much, in the broad scheme of things.

I have made a big deal about total submission to the facts before. But maybe that is just too much to ask of yourself. Maybe, in order to be psychologically healthy, you need some degree of protection from the truth forcing sudden change on you.

One cannot consciously choose delusion. But perhaps one can ease back just a tiny bit on the search for truth in order to give one’s self and one’s soul some breathing space.

All my life, I have felt helpless against powers I could not control.

Maybe one of those powers was me.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.